The relationship between Gossip and Creativity

Creativity has been proposed to be an important display mechanism in social interactions and interpersonal communication-creative combination of concepts is proposed to be a display of mind-reading ability (McKeown, 2013). From an evolutionary perspective-specificall the social brain hypothesis-gossip is an important element of human grooming and status maintenance (Dunbar, 1996). The creative combination of socially important agents and concepts through gossip may demonstrating theory of mind capabilities, knowledge of what is interesting and desirable knowledge, and comprehension of another's thoughts and feelings. Psychological research on gossip has focused neither on its cognitive aspects nor on the role that semantic and conceptual creativity play by capturing and increasing the social currency of the information being transmitted, allowing speaker and receiver to align their minds and display mutual social fitness. By developing recent work on the role of executive functions in creativity (Radel, Davranche, Fournier and Dietrich, 2015; Camarda, Borsi, Agogué, Habib, Weil, Houdé and Cassotti, 2017), we suggest that gossip and creativity share the same cognitive resources, and can be experimentally manipulated using a dual-task paradigms. We predict that engaging cognitive resources in gossip will diminish creativity, suggesting that the mechanisms used for gossip are those used for creativity, with the implication that gossip and creativity are similar cognitive processes. This research will further social interactions and communication research within the social brain hypothesis tradition, may point to a link between gossip and creativity and their mutual roles in navigating the social world.